The tests showed that the birds could see every nonspectral color that the researchers threw at them. Color pairs that were closer together in hue resulted in more mistaken visits but still beat the 50/50 odds of the control experiments. Even if the neural mechanisms for color vision were clear, and even if color-mixing experiments attest to avian tetrachromacy, we still could not answer the more philosophical question of what nonspectral colors really look like to birds. Does UV+green appear to birds as a mix of those colors (analogous to a double-stop chord played by a violinist) or as a sublime new color (analogous to a completely new tone unlike its components)? We cannot say.
A Decade of Sun
For the past 10 years, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has been capturing an image of the Sun every 0.75 seconds. To celebrate, NASA created this 61-minute time lapse video of all 10 years, with each second representing 1 day in the Sun’s life.
Hobby Lobby Gospel
wherein the bible thumpers at hobby lobby get scammed.
Cave King
As far as anyone seems to know, he’s the largest private cave owner in the United States. Ackerman displayed an almost religious devotion to these fragile places and a certain sadness that far too few people seemed to share it, especially now that he’s getting old and the future of his domain is looking murky. His children have embarked on above-ground careers, with little interest in committing to the security, maintenance, and management of his below-ground assets. With no clear heir, and no one with the combined resources and dedication to preside over 64km of caves, Ackerman has considered putting the land in a trust, leaving it to his caving club, or even attempting to work something out with his longtime enemies at the DNR as a last-ditch option.
Foundation
looks promising, but sucks that it is on a little-known streaming platform.
Ettore Majorana
Today, this mathematical curiosity of 1932 still represents a powerful source of new ideas. In this paper there are the first hints for supersymmetry, spin-mass correlation and spontaneous symmetry breaking – 3 fundamental concepts underpinning the Standard Model and beyond. Our understanding of the fundamental laws of nature was already in Majorana’s attempts to describe particles with arbitrary spins in a relativistically invariant way.
Plasma market failure
Countries that follow the WHOs guidance to rely exclusively on voluntary, unpaid donors all have shortages of plasma. So what do these countries do? Import plasma from the paid-donor countries
SETI Limits
there should be at least 36 civilizations within our Galaxy: this is a lower limit, based on the assumption that the average life-time, L, of a communicating civilization is 100 years. If spread uniformly throughout the Galaxy this would imply that the nearest CETI is at most 17K light-years away, and most likely hosted by a low-mass M-dwarf star, far surpassing our ability to detect it for the foreseeable future
Por-Bajin
In Mongolia, a mysterious island ruin Is giving up its secrets. It is now possible to combine tree rings with atmospheric carbon dating to get to yearly precision.
The 5 Borough Bikeway
a plan for more bike lanes in nyc. doesn’t go far enough.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 